ms or empires,
and that finally led over to the modern appreciation of the value of
the {58} common interest of an ideally united humanity? Were not the
prophets of Israel social reformers? Was not the work of Jesus an
anticipation and a prophecy of the coming consciousness of the
brotherhood of man, as the lovers of mankind now conceive that
brotherhood? What has religion had to teach us, some will insistently
ask, more saving, unifying, sustaining, than this love of man for man?

From such a point of view, as you see, our social experience is our
principal source of religious insight. And the salvation that this
insight brings to our knowledge is salvation through the fostering of
human brotherhood. Such salvation accrues to the individual so far as
he gives himself over to the service of man, and to mankind in so far
as men can only be saved together and not separately.

I am just now depicting, not judging, a view concerning the solution
of religious problems which you know to be, in our day, as potent as
it is varied and problematic in its teaching. Can this view satisfy?
Does this way of stating the case really indicate to us any adequate
source of religious insight, any way in which we can define the true
salvation of man?

V

We cannot answer this question without taking account of the views of
those of our recent teachers to whom this purely social theory of the
religious {59} objects and values is indeed profoundly unsatisfactory.
That such opponents of the adequacy of the interpretation of religion
just suggested are to be found amongst the believers in familiar
religious traditions, we need not at any length set forth. The
traditions of the great religions of the world do not interpret the
old faiths in this way, just because these religious traditions all
agree in regarding the human social order as something which exists
for the sake of an essentially superhuman order. As these various
faiths assert, man can never be saved by purely human means, whether
you call these means preventive medicine, or socialism, or universal
brotherhood, or even love, so long as love means simply human love. As
for Christianity, in all its older forms, it has emphasised the love
of man, but always in a certain union with the love of God which
tradition could never conceive as adequately expressible in terms of
our recent social movements. The "Servant in the House" is supposed to
be a modern